CA, United States of America

Quantification of Binding Free Energies in Amyloid-Antibody Systems Related to Alzheimer's and Enhancement of Antibody Binding Affinities

Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

Amyloids comprise of the amino acids that are the primary cause of Alzheimer's; an antibody that binds with high affinity to the amyloid has great potential of being an improved drug candida…

Quick Aligning Telescopes

Physics and Astronomy

Many people enjoy looking through telescopes into the night sky as a hobby, and many people use them as a means of learning more about our universe. To work properly, telescopes must often b…

ResQ: A Low Cost, Wearable, Automatic Fall Detection Device for Senior Citizens

Embedded Systems Third Award

I designed a fall detection device called “ResQ” that automatically detects if a Senior Citizen were to fall down and become unconscious. Upon detection of a fall, the device sends an alert…

Role of Circular RNAs in Drosophila Innate Immunity

Cellular and Molecular Biology

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) constitute a class of relatively unstudied RNAs whose function is unknown. Recently, studies have shown that circRNAs are more abundant than previously recorded. The…

Safecopter: Developing a Collision Avoidance System Based on an Array of Time-of-Flight 3D Cameras

Robotics and Intelligent Machines Third Award

Multicopters have a wide range of applications from surveillance to package delivery and medical support. Although growing in popularity, they are not used yet on an industrial scale for saf…

SmartRate: An Innovation in Automated Early Warning, Detection, and Prevention of Cardiac Death

Biomedical Engineering

The foremost illness in America is heart disease, and current methods of prevention are not enough to mitigate the high fatality rate. Affecting millions worldwide, this disease leads to car…

Stepping into the Future

Engineering Mechanics

This experiment was conducted to determine how many hours of walking was needed to charge a percentage of a cell phone’s battery.A piezoelectric actuator was connected to a full wave rectifi…

Sustainability of Katsuwonus pelamis in California Pelagic Fisheries: Analysis of Natural and Fishing Mortality Data

Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the California skipjack tuna fishery is sustainable or not. This particular study holds great importance in that no California fisheries ha…

Synthesis of Iron Oxide Nanorods

Chemistry Third Award

Currently, nanomaterials easily controlled by an external magnetic field are needed for various applications such as drug delivery systems and bioseparations, but many paramagnetic nanomater…

Testing Seed Viability after Imbibition of Produced Water Treated with Enzyme Additive to Bioremediate Residual Toxins

Environmental Engineering

As water scarcity and the extraction of oil collide, Produced Water (PW) has become a vital asset to commercial and organic farmers. Questions surrounding the uptake of residual toxins prese…

The Effect of the Wavelength of Light on the Growth Rate of Cyanobacteria and Its Survival in a Martian Atmosphere

Microbiology

The purpose of this experiment was to test in what wavelength the cyanobacteria Cylindrospermum (Substitute for Chroococcidiopsis) grows best and whether these wavelengths had an effect on t…

The Effect of Tocotrienol on Apoptosis

Cellular and Molecular Biology

The purpose of my project was to determine if administering tocotrienol with a form of chemotherapy will induce apoptosis at a faster rate. The way I conducted this experiment was that I acq…

The Reversal of Harms Done by the Drought: How the Carbon and Nitrogen Levels Affect Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. Lycopersici Race 3 in Soils to Impact Solanum lycopersicum (Tomato) Plant Growth

Plant Sciences Fourth Award

Food scarcity is a prevalent problem facing our world today, and in fact the UN Food and Agricultural Organization finds that 795 million people are suffering from hunger. In addition, one o…

Toward Precision Medicine: Designing Injectable, Conductive Graphene-Doped Hydrogels and Robust Computational Models for Post-MI Cardiac Tissue Engineering and Drug Discovery

Biomedical Engineering

In 2017, over 8 million people around the world will die of cardiac diseases, most often induced by myocardial infarctions (MIs) and cardiomyopathies. Current treatment options, including he…

Unlocking History: An Algorithm to Virtually Unfold 3D Computed Tomography Scans of Unopened Historical Documents

Robotics and Intelligent Machines Second Award

In 1926, 2600 intricately folded letters from the 17th century were discovered. Opening the letters risks losing the folding patterns, breaking the seals, and destroying the text. Recently,…

Using a Novel Methodology to Constrain the Supermassive Black Hole-Galaxy Coevolution and Analyze the Selection Bias

Physics and Astronomy Second Award

This project studied the effects of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) on their host galaxies in relation to their inherent properties. It also shed light on the Shankar et al. (2016) controve…

Using Dropsonde Descending Speed to Determine Vertical Air Velocity in a Hurricane

Earth and Environmental Sciences Second Award

The objective of this project is to derive the vertical air currents in hurricanes using a physics-based model to describe the dropsonde fall speed in still air. By assuming that the dropson…

Using Machine Learning to Predict Postprandial Blood Glucose in Type 1 Diabetics

Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Fourth Award

People with Type 1 Diabetes must compute an insulin dose for every meal. Dosing errors can cause both acute and chronic complications. The current dosing method (i.e., "carb counting") consi…

Using Specific Heat Capacity to Engineer a Thermal Evacuation Suit to Address Heat Transfer Processes

Materials Science Fourth Award

OBJECTIVE: To engineer a high heat conduction thermal evacuation suit that also addresses superheated gas. Suit will allow a person to escape a fire of 980°C & convection heat of 32kph for 5…

Utilization of Triglycerides from Spent Coffee Grounds to Create Methyl Esters through Transesterification

Environmental Engineering

Among the many biomass sources that can be used as biofuel, coffee grounds are a viable source of fatty acids for producing biodiesel. Over 500,000 tons of coffee ground waste is created yea…

Accelerating Cancer Immunotherapy: Optimization of an EGFRvIII-Based Cancer Vaccine via Computationally-aided Analysis of Proteasome Processing for Improved Glioblastoma Prognosis

First Award

Cancer vaccines are a revolutionary field of cancer therapeutics that aim to utilize the body’s natural defenses to treat cancer. Through this research, I optimized an effective anti-cancer…

A Machine Learning Approach for Predicting Drug Efficacy

One of the most challenging problems in the field of medical science today is predicting the drugs that will work for specific cancer patients. The future of personalized cancer therapies re…

A Machine Learning Framework for Multi-Omics Discovery and Characterization of Gene Co-Alterations Impacting Disease

First Award

Multifactorial diseases are a product of simultaneous alterations in several genes. However, there exists no computationally robust method to fully understand the relationship between co-alt…

A Novel Treatment for Candida glabrata Infection

Fourth Award

Candida glabrata is a fungus that causes life threatening infection in humans. Recently, some strains have become resistant to current antifungal drugs such as caspofungin, and new drugs are…

Application of EMDomics to Identify Age-Associated Expression and Treatments in Cancer

Differential gene expression analysis is commonly used to associate gene expression with a biological or clinical subtype of patients. However, patients rarely divide into homogeneous groups…

A Search and Exploration of Multi-Exoplanet Systems Using Novel Photometric and TTV Algorithms for the K2 Mission

Our Earth is in a multi-planet system, and this is thought to have been crucial for the formation of life. Yet it is poorly understood whether multi-planet systems like our Solar System are…

Assessing the Effectiveness of Virtual Psychotherapies for OCD by Developing a Novel Software Application

Biomedical and Health Sciences

The goal of this research project was to assess the effectiveness of virtual psychotherapy treatments and to develop an intuitive self-help software application for treating obsessive-compul…

Automated Diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy Severity in Color Fundus Images Using a Novel Synthesis of Biological and Data Driven Approaches

Third Award

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the leading causes of preventable blindness globally. Current screening for DR is based on manual grading of severity, leading to undiagnosed and untreate…

Closing the Achievement Gap in STEM: The Influence of Prior Knowledge on the Guidance Effects in Technology-Based Guided Student-Centered Learning

Biomedical and Health Sciences

As the U.S. is falling behind in STEM education and struggling with the achievement gap, there have been many practical obstacles concerning teachers and existing multimedia tools in impleme…

Cold vs. Allergy: Use of Nasal Cytology to Determine If High School Students Can Accurately Predict Their Own Diagnosis

Colds and nasal allergies are common. These two conditions share similar symptoms, and are difficult to differentiate. The distinction is important because treatments are different. Student…